Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

The Booker prize boosts the paltry sales of literary fiction. But I wonder how most authors keep going

Two recent surveys have found that 60 percent of British authors earn less than 10,000 pounds a year.

Blake Morrison writing in The Guardian:

You know that feeling you get when you're eating in an empty restaurant or seem to be the only guest at a hotel, yet there are lots of waiters, chefs, maids, cleaners, barmen, receptionists, etc, and you think: how can they afford to keep going? Where's the income coming from? The figures don't add up. The business looks doomed. But when you return a year later the place is exactly as before.

I had that feeling this week, about literary fiction, after the award of the Man Booker prize. The Booker is always a special week for fiction. And though terrestrial television coverage of the event is shorter and frothier than it used to be - 60 seconds of high drama on the 10 o'clock news as the winner is announced, rather than a half-hour programme with author interviews and a panel of critics - media interest remains intense. That's true in general of literary fiction: the new Philip Roth, the award of the Nobel prize to Doris Lessing, the reports of this or that novelist (usually Martin Amis) being involved in some spat - all generate hundreds of column inches. Reading groups have given a boost to fiction, too. And when, amid the bow ties and posh frocks, the Booker goes to a writer as talented as Anne Enright, it seems all's right with the world.